This gown needs earrings. Big, blingy, look-at-me earrings. Photos by BF Newhall
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
The long dress I was planning to wear to my son’s wedding needed earrings. Not [Read more...]
A Dad, a Mom and an 8-Year-Old With a Bashed Lip
April 11, 2013 By 2 Comments
The Walrus Boy got his picture taken a week or so after being bashed in the lip by a hard ball that was hit off a T. BF Newhall photo.
Here’s a story about my husband, my son and an errant baseball. I wrote it when Peter was eight — and I was a mom who worried a lot.
By Barbara Falconer Newhall, The Oakland Tribune, May 14, 1989
It’s all their fault. They don’t do their share of the housework. They edge us out of the good jobs. They don’t talk about their feelings, and when we talk about ours they don’t listen. They are insensitive. They are selfish. [Read more...]
Shopping for a Mother-of-the-Groom Dress — Is That Me in the Mirror? Or Somebody’s Grandmother?
March 30, 2013 By 21 Comments
Dumpy: I’m smiling at the nice salesperson who took this picture — not because I like this fussy mother-of-the-bride/groom gown at David’s Bridal Salon in Pinole, CA, where most of the zippers seemed to stick and a stubborn one required an emergency visit to the alterations department. BF Newhall photo
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
My son is getting married. I’ll need a dress. A dress that makes me look terrific. [Read more...]
The (Two-Year-Old) Rhetorician at Our House
February 15, 2013 By 2 Comments
The rhetorician in 1985 with crib, blankies and bottle. Photo by BF Newhall
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
What’s rhetoric? I’ve always thought of it as the high-flown, idealistic and/or manipulative language of politics. But really, it’s something we human beings do all the time. My daughter Christina, for example, discovered the art of rhetoric right around the time she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup. [Read more...]
Real Snow in Minnesota . . . and Real Warm in My Real Austrian Walkjanker
February 8, 2013 By 9 Comments
A snowplow cleared snow — tried to — from the driveway of the Eden Prairie, MN, Community Center. Jon and I and the kids went there every day during our visit to Minnesota so we could work off the meals we sampled during auditions for our May rehearsal dinner. Photo by BF Newhall
My vintage, preindustrial Austrian Walkjanker finally got to strut its thermal stuff. Photo by Jon Newhall.
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
My genuine Austrian Walkjanker had hung forlornly at the far end of a plastic garment bag for decades. It had no place to go.
Till my son got engaged to a Minnesota girl.
A classic Walkjanker, just so you know, is a traditional, no-nonsense Austrian winter jacket of real wool. It’s densely knit and, using an ancient, pre-industrial technology known as Walke in German and fulling in English, it is aggressively soaked, heated, beaten and shrunk until it’s two-thirds its original size and the scales on the wool fibers have loosened and hooked on to each other. The finished fabric is as thick and stiff and impenetrable as a slab of berber carpeting.
It’s a garment so old-timey and so Old World that even Google [Read more...]
